The 5 types of curiosity and their characteristics

Human beings are very curious beings. We want to know about everything and about any situation, person or object, and for that reason we do not stop collecting all kinds of knowledge that are presented around us.

However, in the same way that there are people of all types, there are also different types of curiosity. These can depend on both the objective and the context in which the person is.

Let's see a little more in depth how many types of curiosity there are, why it is a concept a bit difficult to define and some proposals that have been made.

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How to classify the forms that curiosity takes?

The human being is a curious animal by nature. All of us, to a greater or lesser extent, like to discover new things. It is true that there are people more favorable to discovering things that go out of their routine than others, since that this in itself is a personality trait within the dimension of openness to experience. But regardless of how open to experience we are, the truth is that we cannot help being curious at some point in our lives.

If we were to make a list of types of curiosity, we would surely come up with many types, each depending on factors such as context, motivation, personality traits of the person who shows it and an extensive list of aspects. For example, we could talk about happy curiosity, need, stress, experiences, social and other categories, many of them based more on general culture rather than scientifically based research well-founded.

So, in a very general sense, we could say that there are as many types of curiosity as there are contexts and people. However, many psychologists have wanted to establish a taxonomy of curiosity, a classification system for the types that are believed to exist, something that we are going to see in great detail a few paragraphs below. At the moment it is agreed that, properly speaking, there would be 5 types of curiosity and these would be related to two interesting styles or patterns of curious behavior.

The 5 types of curiosity: a classification

Todd B. Kashdan, from George Mason University, together with his collaborators, carried out a study in 2017 that has helped him create a taxonomy of types of curiosity. These types would be the following 5:

1. Joyful exploration

The joyous exploration matches the classic and popular culture idea that curiosity is. Would be the one It manifests itself when we are looking for something related to new knowledge or information motivated by joy, by the desire to learn something that we did not know. It would be the curiosity we show when we want to know what a new brand of yogurt tastes like, who built a building or what is the mating pattern of sea lions.

2. Sensitivity to deficiency

Sensitivity to lack is a type of curiosity whose emotional stimulus is negative, such as tension or anxiety.

It is that yearning we feel when we want to know how a historical event that enters the history exam took place, how a mathematical problem is solved by the that they are going to evaluate us or want to know what will happen in the next chapter of our favorite soap opera after knowing that one of the characters has been unfaithful to the protagonist.

3. Stress tolerance

Stress tolerance kicks in when doubt or anxiety is accepted in the face of new events that are complex and mysterious.

This type of curiosity, in one way or another, helps reduce resistance to changes that may occur when receiving new information. It is the type of curiosity that motivates us to ask ourselves what could be beyond fear, such as when there is a change in the government of our country or there is a change in company policy.

4. Social curiosity

Social curiosity would be one that involves wanting to know what other people are thinking and doing by watching, talking, or gossiping. This curiosity is synonymous with the desire to know the lives of others through different media, such as social networks, heart programs, news, newspapers ...

5. Thrill seeking

Thrill seeking is what leads us to seek new experiences at the cost of taking physical, social and financial risks. An example of this type of curiosity would be what we feel when we want to explore extreme sports, travel to an exotic country, try drugs or invest in the stock market.

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Hunters and meddlers

As we have just seen, Kashdan proposed a taxonomy of five types of curiosity, which would manifest themselves in different contexts. However, other studies have tried to see to what extent curiosity is related to our mood and what role it plays with our emotional well-being. Since curiosity has a nature with such unclear limits, trying to measure it objectively has been a real challenge.

One of the most recurrent methods to measure curiosity has been see to what extent the participants felt “hooked” with a series of activities, how many questions and in what way they gossiped with the researcher about the topic or objective of the task that they had been asked to do.

However, this methodology has several problems, among them that they only serve to measure the curiosity explicitly shown by the participant and they do not serve to make typologies of it. In addition, it must be taken into account that the dimension of extraversion can make it believe that a curious person, by the simple fact of being introverted and not very assertive, she is less interested in the activity that has been proposed.

Taking all this into account and knowing how complicated it is to clearly define types of curiosity, the David M. Lydon-Staley delved into the field of philosophy to study two styles of curious behavior and to see in what way they manifested different curious behaviors: the hunters or "hunters" and the meddles or "Busybody".

His method of looking at these two curious behavior styles is quite innovative. His experiment consisted of using Wikipedia, the largest free encyclopedia on the Internet that, among its many advantages, are that it does not has ads and its pages allow you to jump to others by clicking on words highlighted in color blue. In addition, the page has its own classic browser of pages organized into articles, which allows you to search for a topic very easily.

The study was conducted with a sample of 149 participants who were asked to freely browse Wikipedia during the 15 minutes it lasted. each daily session during a period of 21 days, adding a total of 5 hours in which each of the subjects spent browsing this encyclopedia in line. To study their behavior, the researchers used a branch of mathematics called graph theory.

Graph theory is a method that helped researchers to see where their participants were navigating. Without going into details about this complex theory, what we can highlight is that through it the researchers were able to see if the participants were looking for Wikipedia articles that had a thematic relationship or if they jumped from topic to topic, thus showing curiosity, interest in things they read, but in different ways.

It was thanks to this study that they were able to conceptualize a new dimension of curious behavior, in which one extreme corresponds to the hunters and the other to the nosy. The hunter style is characterized by looking for information closely related to a topic, delving into that same topic and without going too far into the topic. On the other hand, the nosy style is one in which you skip from topic to topic, collecting very varied information and without delving into it.

By using Wikipedia and allowing participants complete freedom to satisfy their curiosity, the researchers were able to overcome the limitation of extraversion since, thanks to this method, both introverts and extraverts had the same opportunities to pry. Regardless of how assertive they were, participants clicked links and used the browser completely freely, without feeling self-conscious about doing so.

Curiosity styles

The styles of curiosity that we have just seen and the 5 types of curiosity above are related. It should be noted that the curiosity styles, shown in the form of navigation patterns within Wikipedia, are not fixed styles, that is, a person does not she's just a hunter or just nosy but can change the curious behavior style based on how she feels and what kind of curiosity manifest. In other words, the hunter-meddles dimension is a highly variable continuum, which depends more on context than on personality itself.

In the same study, the researchers administered a questionnaire before each session of browsing the encyclopedia with the intention of understand what factors influence the appearance of one style of curiosity or another. Among these indicators were curiosity-type sensitivity to lack and the search for emotions. As we have commented, the first would be a curiosity to fill knowledge gaps that feel like stressful, while the second would be related to feeling new sensations, feeling experiences exciting.

These same researchers saw, when measuring the search for sensations before doing the browsing session by Wikipedia, that people tended to take longer steps, that is, jump from topic to topic when this type of dimension She was tall. The same thing happened if the participants indicated that they had less sensitivity to deficiencies, not feeling the need to delve too deeply into what they read, characteristics of an intrusive style.

Seen this, have hypothesized that the type of curiosity of the moment influences the style of curious behavior that is manifested. If you have to study for an exam or delve into a certain subject that we are going to be evaluated, the sensitivity to absence is presented and a hunter-like style is applied. On the other hand, if she is reading or researching for pleasure, wanting to discover something new, it is applied a nosy style, showing that we can be one and the other depending on our objective.

Bibliographic references:

• David M. Lydon-Staley et al. (2020). Hunters, busybodies and the knowledge network building associated with deprivation curiosity, Nature Human Behavior DOI: 10.1038 / s41562-020-00985-7
• Kashdan, Todd & Stiksma, Mel & Disabato, David & Mcknight, Patrick & Bekier, John & Kaji, Joel & Lazarus, Rachel. (2017). The Five-Dimensional Curiosity Scale: Capturing the bandwidth of curiosity and identifying four unique subgroups of curious people. Journal of Research in Personality. 73. 10.1016 / j.jrp.2017.11.011.